On October 25, Drag City and Soccer Club Club are excited to drop Lesley Arfin’s first graphic art collection: a hardcover book of her drawings and paintings entitled Tickle Me. Best known as a comedian, a writer, and a producer with a remarkable ability to channel the heaviest of feels, Lesley’s new book offers her glittery reflections on gender, weather, mistakes, feminism, fantasy, failure, and nostalgia across 54 full-color pages of watercolor, gauche, acrylic, fiber, stickers and collage.

Perhaps you first encountered Lesley Arfin in the pages of VICE, where her “Dear Diary” column ran for six years in the aughts. Maybe you read all those searing “Diary” entries in the book collection, coupled with latter-day Lesley’s acerbic responses. Or perhaps you sat up late falling in with the poor fucked-up creatures of Love (Netflix, 2016-2019). Between these and her work on Girls, Awkward., Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Betty, there’s any number of ways you might have happened upon Lesley Arfin over the past twenty-plus years. Tickle Me emboldens a path less-traveled for Lesley, until now: visual artist. By the time she reached the apex grind of network television, doing a little painting seemed downright relaxing! Not to mention therapeutic, until it got to be so compelling it was like OCD; the busier she was with work, marriage, having a baby, the more images came, the more paintings piled up. As you look through the images that make up Tickle Me, you see Lesley tapping her familiar depths — and the creepy humor that she finds down there — through an outrageous riot of flowers and colors and 70s Sears Catalog imagery!

Tickle Me is available October 25, 2024. To celebrate, Lesley will launch the book in Los Angeles with a release party at Warby Parker (3916 Sunset Blvd) on Friday, September 27, 6–8 p.m. PT.